Tag Archives: employees



Obsess about your employees

July 1st, 2009

Really obsess about your employees.  Look after them.

No seriously, the good guys aren’t hanging about, especially if you don’t look after them.

If I was hiring, things I’d offer are:

  • Decent Health & Life Insurance
  • Huge holidays, if you want to take 3 months off no pay, let’s figure out how to do that.
  • Extra benefits for family guys
  • Performance bonuses based on real business value that employees contribute
  • Own time to build personal projects, whether related to business or not (including building personal brand, blogging, twitter)
  • Flexible hours.  What are rigid schedules for? Deliver on time, don’t care whether you do 1 hour or 2 hours.
  • Flexible location, if you can do the work from Cambodia whilst you do some travel, let’s make that happen
  • Want to build a startup out of work hours? All good, maybe we can sort you out with some equity or loans to give you a helping hand.

Oh and of course a reasonable wage.

Maybe this sounds like a pipe dream or maybe providing a dream job scenario will attract dream employees…


It's Friday!

February 16th, 2009

Actually I fib, it’s Tuesday.

TGIF

People look forward to fridays, end of the week, the weekend is looming.

We also regret Mondays.

This can be good or bad depending on your perspective. I say flip it.

How can you make your employees long for Monday to get stuck into their project and begret fridays? What does it say about your workplace?


Personality

November 12th, 2008

What is personality?

Google ‘definition of personality’ returns “the complex of all the attributes–behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental–that characterize a unique individual; “their different …”

Essentially personality is what makes us different and unique.

Big businesses try to stamp out personality to keep regimented systems for franchises, to reassure customers, to get the right cogs doing what they need to.

Yet more often than not a loyalty between organisations is between people, not the brands.

It’s people behind every company and every interaction and with people comes their personality.

We shouldn’t shy away from that, we should embrace it, what are the personalities behind our business? and how can we leverage that? (and in term keep them happy).

I was thinking this as I bought a coffee from Cafe Monet, in Newmarket.  

I wandered in and 3 people were in there and they all said hey anton, morning anton, etc to (as I instantly became aware) Anton the barista.

Anton looked up and said ‘hey buddy’ to me, and carried on talking to various people, within 30 seconds you could tell he was the personality behind the cafe and the reason people kept coming back.

It was like everyone was friends, a real sense of community.

I daresay his 10% extra effort with every customer leads to 80% (or higher) return rates.  

I’ll definitely be going back to say hi to Anton and grab a coffee (plus the coffee isn’t half bad).

The question is, what personalities do we have? and how can we embrace them?


What does all this have to do with Marketing

October 7th, 2008

Of recent there have been posts around Do What you Love, Life Marketing, Those that turn up

What do these have to do with Marketing?

Simple they are all marketing.

If you as a person, are doing what you love, turning up where others are not, thinking of the bigger picture, what do you think this says about you?

What is the conversation going on in people that surround you?

The conversation is going to be much more engaging than otherwise.

Now imagine:

  • Your company is built up on people that do all of these
  • Your customers deal with these kinds of people day to day
  • In rough times what kind of people are going to stick it out?
Suddenly it makes sense.  Marketing is communication and communication happens between people.  Quite often we forget that.

(and for those worried you can breath a sigh of relief, it all intertwines).


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